The long-running Call of Duty franchise has more laurels to its name than most though, of late, it has become known for one thing: Multiplayer. This wasn’t always the case though, honestly, the series has struggled with balancing the needs of a single-player campaign with the challenges of a well-balanced and compelling multiplayer game.
After all, when you’re a series that posts first-day numbers that would make Hollywood jealous, you don’t really want to mess with a tried-and-true formula. So 2014’s Advanced Warfare did as much as it could to shake things up and, in many ways, might be the last really serious effort in this direction since.
How so?
For one, it offered players the complete Call of Duty experience. That means single-player and multiplayer modes both chock full of action. The cinematic experience of the former and the interactive incentive of the latter combined for a total package though one not without flaws.
How to Download Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
You can download the game from Steam or from a console store. To access the links, click on the Download button below this review. Check out also our review of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.
The Game Review
For one, it offered players the complete Call of Duty experience. That means single-player and multiplayer modes both chock full of action. The cinematic experience of the former and the interactive incentive of the latter combined for a total package though one not without flaws.
One major change that is notable when compared to its predecessors is the somewhat controversial decision to remove the heads-up display in favor of in-game holographic projections of critical information on weapons and such.
Aside from this, there is also the addition of an exoskeleton that grants the player “Exo movements” akin to Halo 3’s mechanics for Master Chief in a similar vein; namely, these include boost, dash, and sky jump, among others.
The campaign, as one might expect of a game that posts revenues like Call of Duty titles tend to do, featured none other than Kevin Spacey as the bad guy and Troy Baker as our hero.
Not only did this underscore how serious Call of Duty was as a video game series, but it was also a shot over the bow at Hollywood and a seeming proclamation that the long-promised days of video games challenging and overtaking California’s celluloid paradise were soon at hand.
Of course, as we all know, the cinematic style-driven so hard by titles like Call of Duty was later abandoned by the series in off-and-on again flirtations with single-player but it has become a standard in gaming as a whole.
Aside from multiplayer and zombies, there was the Exo Survival mode. Nothing more than your standard survival mode, it pitted a squad of players against wave after wave of enemies to see how long they could last. In many ways, it is similar to the zombies’ mode though without its flare.
Speaking of which, the exo upgrades that players enjoyed in the game were not exclusive to them alone and would actually factor into the zombie mode itself. This results in a unique experience when compared to the zombies’ multiplayer diversion found in other Call of Duty games at the time.
A testament to Call of Duty’s emergence as a truly blockbuster franchise and a bit of an experiment in trying new things, Advanced Warfare will have its fans and detractors but few can doubt its quality and that it is a solid contribution to Infinity Ward’s portfolio.
